Promoting Science Literacy through a Regional Science Fair

by T.R. Girill
STC Fellow

T. R. currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project.

Some public events have a dual character that greatly increases their ethical reach and value to society. A charity foot race, for example, can be more than just an athletic competition if it also encourages healthy exercise. A regional science fair offers this same potential: it can be just a project contest, or it can share inclusive, supportive educational opportunities with diverse students. This year the director of the Tri-Valley Science and Engineering Fair (TVSEF) chose the second fork, with interesting benefits for technical literacy.

Student Outreach

Many students ignore poster planning or view it as a decorative afterthought. For the first time this January, however, 80 seventh-grade science students in Regina Brinker's classes at Livermore's Christensen Middle School explored posters from the usability perspective. Six weeks later, 17 seniors in Frankie Tate's AP Biology class at Granada High School joined in a similar discussion. A 45-minute tour of "the science of science posters" left these students with nine analyzed, comparative examples of effective and inept previous science fair posters, along with a checklist of personal actions for improving their own poster drafts. As always, the goal here was to connect a school project with real-world information-sharing skills.

Teacher Support

The official Web site of the TVSEF (tvsef.llnl.gov) not only provides necessary forms and rules, but also suggests helpful resources for students and their sponsoring teachers. This year, that Web site gained a three-page primer for teachers and parents about "what students can learn about science communication from science fair posters." This again introduces poster design as usability engineering. It notes the unusual learning constraints that poster audiences face. And it links teachers to the student checklist and to other relevant parts of the larger EBSTC technical literacy collection.

Project Feedback

Proposed TVSEF projects are always reviewed for parental and teacher supervision (and, if needed, human-subject consent). This year, Nadine Horner also encouraged the science review panel to promote inclusive participation. Application reviewers offered safety suggestions, project clarifications, and alerts about explanatory pitfalls to help underprepared students (and their teachers).

The contest aspect of the 2008-2009 Tri-Valley Science and Engineering Fair ended with formal project judging and awards on March 25, 2009. However, the techniques for effective nonfiction communication that it passed along to local science students and their teachers will last a lifetime.

To learn more about the literacy outreach project, to suggest a teacher who might want to host future technical-writing workshops for their classes, or to participate yourself, please contact T.R.Girill (trgirill@acm.org).